THAT doesn’t look right…. (take 2)

June 23, 2013

As I’ve noted before, there’s no such thing as a knitter who doesn’t make mistakes. Learning to spot mistakes and figuring out how to correct them is something every knitter must do. If you don’t, you’ll end up frozen — confronted with a mistake that you’re unable to fix and unable to continue your project.

In the course of knitting the pieces — all 56 of them — for the Illusion Cube Blanket, I’ve made multiple mistakes. Sometimes I’ve spotted the mistake right away and been able to correct it with relatively little effort. Like forgetting to switch colors and realizing that I’ve knit four rows of periwinkle instead of two.

Another kind of mistake sneaks up on you. You think you’ve finished a cube just fine until you look carefully and realize there’s something not quite right. Like this:

It wasn’t until I took a photo of these two cubes, made with the same colors but in different combinations, that I spotted my mistake. Do you see it?

There should be 5 stripes of the alternate (non-border) color on each side of the cube. In this one, I’d only knit four.

While sorting and counting the cubes I’d completed, I discovered a couple more that had mistakes.

But, I hear you asking, what do you DO when you find a mistake? Do you have to correct it? Or in this case, make new cubes with the proper number of stripes?

The answer depends on your preference. There are no knitting police or inspectors who will check your work and mark you down for errors. What do YOU want to do about it? How daunting is the correction? How will YOU feel when you look at your finished project — will the error seem glaring to you even if no one else can see it without your pointing it out? Do you care?

For me, for this project, I decided to knit new cubes with the proper number of stripes and correctly matched borders. After all, when you’re knitting 56 lovely striped cubes, what’s 3 or 4 more?!

3 Responses to “THAT doesn’t look right…. (take 2)”

for a long time (sewing), I just would NOT undo a seam. Now I do all the time. It’s funny how it changes – that preference about whether to live with or to fix. I always felt like mistakes in knitting were less forgiving… can’t wait to see the finished blanket!

You are so right about mistakes. My daughter says I make all sweaters twice. I don’t tell her about the run-away stiches I have pick up and remember which side the purls and knits go when the pattern is created with varying stitches.